I have been scaling my media biz. Like, literally. I am—for seven seconds in a rotating loop—a billboard. Or at least an image of my face is—and by face, I mean the one made for radio, and by radio, specifically The Drive 95.5 FM, which I host from 3 to 6pm, weekdays.
As a concept, the billboard predates the advent of the ever-shrinking American attention span. Ancient Egyptians carved public notices into stone—arguably the first “out-of-home media buy.” By the 1830s, ur–Mad Man Jared Bell was plastering New York City with oversized posters to hawk circus acts like Barnum & Bailey, thus inventing what we’d recognize as the modern billboard. These were large, loud and impossible to ignore. Which is to say: Not much has changed.
My particular incarnation, glowing over Rohnert Park in crisp LED glory, lasts roughly as long as a TikTok clip, but bigger. A lot bigger. It’s a sideways, 48-foot-wide by 14-foot-tall social media post. It’s what multinational ad and PR firm Publicis Groupe’s Rishad Tobaccowala calls “Instagram on steroids.” In my case, this tracks: The board gets 220,144 weekly impressions, while my actual Instagram posts seldom crack two…